BEELINES IN WINTER

This is a long one. Not a litbit at all but a litlot. I wrote it in four parts. Just recorded it, it’s early and I’m a little nasal-y, sorry, also it’s 18 minutes long and imperfect.

According to what I wrote this morning and my very full head it’s going to get even longer. Oh man. I think this might be Chapter One. Uh-oh. Not sure I’m ready for this but here goes.

Some of you have been asking whether I see your comments. Yes! I see! I think you have to have a google account in order to get notifications of my response, if you comment as a guest you’re on your own I think, sorry, the only way to see other comments (and mine) is to check back now and then (you can click the pink text above to get to the main page where most of the previous stories are available). Many of you send emails instead of commenting which is fine, it’s great, but it’s also nice for others to see what you have to say.

And if you are inclined to comment I have a question. Are you interested in reading this novel chapter by chapter on a weekly basis, or do you prefer little independent stories?

I’m going to tuck myself back into Chapter Two now, I am disappearing into fiction, I ‘m on the bus, the windows are so salty it feels like there’s nothing out there, there are a few of the letters in the pages of my beekeeping book.

Thanks for being here.

BEELINES IN WINTER by Sherry Cassells

The Angst

My hands were so winter dry yesterday I used lotion, I worked it in as I looked through the kitchen window into my reflection layered as it was with the darkening woods, I reminded myself of my mother as I saw her when I was young, when I did my homework at the kitchen table, but it came to me all of a sudden that my own slippery hands were not an accurate representation of hers, she hadn’t been applying lotion, she'd been wringing her hands, her expressionless face pointed through her own reflection, her soul performing an Edvard Munch scream.

This revelation was the second most powerful of my life – the first then needs to be told – I used to think we lived on the inside of the earth. The dawning of the truth left me sleepless in childhood but not the solid insomnia of last night upon the discovery of my mother's hidden angst.

My father was a beekeeper, he’d grown up gifted on this same land, able to read a beeline without being taught, he said the bees had been in him since birth and I tried to get a bee of my own, I lay in bed every morning and listened, manifested, sometimes the wind would catch my ear and I’d think finally until I turned my head to the truth, but today for the first time I am certain of the inner presence of a bee. I am not sure where it is. It extends in brief spasms to my fingers and toes, when I rub my hands together it, she – her presence is feminine – she stills. It is only 4am, dark dark dark, I blow gently at the kitchen window and she comes up my throat into my mouth, my lips narrow like birth and she leaves me, there she goes, unhindered by glass, unbothered by winter, the bee goes straight.

The way I follow her is the same as the act of threading a needle, but unimaginably larger, it involves the whole world.

I crumple tissue up my sleeve, I like a clean kitchen before bed, when a button comes off I tend to it immediately, things like that, things I thought were my mother’s idiosyncrasies are now normal, my lined-up boots at the door each contain a wool sock, my coat is in its place, shoulders back chest out, my hat and gloves there there there. I follow the bee through the woods. I wonder why I did not do this before, why I did not make this beeline as a child playing hide and seek, why did I not come this way to kiss my cowboys and my lumberjacks, but it comes to me clear as our placement on the world that there are other means of protection, this cold morning I feel my father, his arm opens the snowy fronds, he says in branches and wind, look Kate look.

This is not a fairy tale but the dilapidated heap of a former bee kingdom, I know my way around, the bee has returned to my gut, I take a single drawer and go back in my tracks to the house where I put it on the kitchen table and study its architecture, there is a sweetness as the wood warms, I bite, I taste, I spit, my father was a carpenter by trade, I know these bones are the cypress he preferred, the same wood he ordered for the sheep house, he would never call it a barn, he saved a lick for the centre of the slide he made for me, see where it still stands, and look, the sheep house also remains in perfect condition, my three sheep on one side, my workshop on the windowless other.

Curious sheep nearly collapse me, I stand on stacked crates, they nose the backs of my knees, I buckle and stand and buckle and stand, I reach for a box and in that box is A Gentlewoman’s Guide to Beekeeping, that’s when the second bee kicks in, a third circles my head like a crown, I allow one sheep into the house with me, they know whose turn it is, she stands in front of my evening chair, I place one bare foot and then the other upon her back, she moves closer so my knees bend at her spine, she purrs, she waits for the tic tic tic of knitting needles which my sheep adore but I open the book and start reading, she shuffles, my three bees take a warm turn, in the morning there are four.

I am not young yet I am capable of this sort of pregnancy, the things I read in the book I realize at each sentence I already know, it has come late to me this intuition, unlike my father who was born with it mine has been incubating, discovered by chance because of a visit into my childhood, my mother through her screaming reflection had her eye on the beekeeper – or did she?

The Elsewhere

The next morning I took my shake-leg sheep back to her triangle.

It had come to me in the night, between drifts of sleep, that my mother had not been looking at the beekeeper at all, but at the elsewhere.

I think we know our crackling moments of change as they occur and that was one of mine. When I understood that my mother's angst was yearning and that her yearning was for elsewhere, I experienced one of the most fundamental changes of my life.

Because my mother's elsewhere was, mine is.

Suddenly it popped like a hole in my head, infinitesimal, vulnerable, it shook and nearly disappeared yet it was enough to throw my equilibrium, and as if my sheep nosed the backs of my knees again, I teetered.

The majority of these opportunities for change we ignore, our bodies know to heal them immediately, completely, that is the danger, but my purposeful bee went right to it, she crossed my heart as she beelined to the small open window at my temple, I believe she was trying to prevent my hurtling white blood cells from tending it.

I left her to her work. 

There is plenty of time to allow nothing on a farm in the winter and that’s what I did, I baked charcoal crackers for the sheep, I spun their grey wool, and after mixing dollops of leftover paint, I covered a single kitchen wall in the resulting grey. That night brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, my sheep waiting her turn at my evening chair, I noticed that my darker left eye was the grey of the wet paint, my more powdery right, the grey of the dry.

Our different eye colour was a whim of genetics my parents and I shared, there’s a black and white photograph in which we are pressing our three heads together, I am in the centre, the dot of our dash dot dash mouths. Our eyes are open wide wide wide. My father's left eye is the darkest, and in perfect increments we end up at the palest eye, my mother’s right, the very one I am now able to see elsewhere through, just as I see the newly revealed beeline through my father’s darkest.

There is so much to do about this that I do the only thing available and that which I believe to be the most vital. I do nothing.

The Nothing 

I walk in curves through the white forest, the snow heaps on the netted branches lowering them in an elegant way, they curtsy and bow, no sound but the private friction of my head in my hood, this is the nothing.

How can emptiness take up space I don’t know but it moves in, I think it’s my mother’s, it enters my blood stream and renders my machine inefficient, I feel a vital absence like organ theft, I frisk myself, count my blue toes in the shower.

When I returned the sheep to its triangle I walked into the windowless workshop so stuffed with grey, the Morse code photograph came to mind and I had an idea about it, I wanted to look at it, not in benign adoration but to see if I'm right.

I walk my fingers through the contents of cookie tins no no no, I flip through photo albums no no no, frayed stacks I deal like cards no no no. In my parents’ untouched bedroom I swirl my mother’s lavender scented things, move my father’s goods like chess pieces, I find a wrinkled card with a watercolour oval and when I open it there stands my young signature, KATE, tall and skinny like me, not a curve in sight, HAPPY ETHER MOM & DAD printed like a fence, but I do not find what I am looking for.

Our house has no established front or back, there is a forest side and a road side, the road ends here. In winter the school bus didn’t come, I had to walk to Maynard’s corner where we, a grubby hatch of snotty stragglers, were picked up. The bus driver taught fiddle every Wednesday, we sang all the way to school. I can beeline where the songs are stored in my brain, even now they jostle out of my mouth, I cannot shower without them, dosey-doe your towel. He used to miss the turn sometimes and we’d sail along the shores of Lake Superior, we felt like gods, we sang our hearts out, when it was my turn to play, holding the fiddle was like handling a lamb, clumsy at first both of us, the lamb soon quieted and the fiddle bleated.

I waited for the beekeeper to come in every night, my father who zigzagged the forest with a lantern, through the tall straight birch glowing, I went to the porch in my nightgown, cupped my hands and sang good night, dosey-doe, he never shouted back so stealthy was his work, but my heart lighted at the tilt of his beefull head, his duelling eyes, I knew, adored me. 

While my mother flicked her blue dress and sang Que Sera Sera, her secret signal of distress while I thought the charming lyrics were for me, like Doris Day's were for her child, but she was deceiving us, hiding her misery, she was the captive one.

You can see the lake from the hill on the other side of the road that isn’t there, and even when there’s weather or darkness I can see it between the treetops, there's a slide show in my forehead, there’s a rock shelf to the west and so a gap in the treeline where the waves slide a full greyscale, was it Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, who said on her deathbed open my heart and you'll find England.

Open mine and you’ll see the lake through the treetops.

My mother the mistress of decoy used to say if you are looking for something and can't find it, try looking for something else.

So I sang Que Sera Sera, I cannot wear a dress but flick my jeans, there’s a button missing from my tweed coat, my mother’s tweed coat, it’s a shade of teal like what puddles in the springtime between the treetops, so I half search for it, not instead, not in earnest, but in addition to the dash-dot-dash photograph. I do not look in viable places, I search corners not curves but wouldn’t you know I find it, the button, when I pick it up there’s the photo, there's the circle of my face in the drawer beneath the teal – I don’t know what happened to the button I never saw it again – with the photograph I dosey-doe to the stove and beneath the strong white light I look to see if my dot mouth and my wide eyes mean what I think they mean, and they do, I am trying with all my might to be a bee.

The Wonderful

It is asking too much, you are already extended, so I will not say a bee rides each shoulder, this is not a fairy tale, but the mechanics of them, my shoulders, as well as my hips knees ankles are different, every day something feels better, my stolen organs one after the other were only borrowed for repair, my ten toes are pink, the netting of my fascia fine-tuned, balance allowed, trauma – we all contain trauma – reduced. I have lost count of my internal bees, I believe they are to me what the animated bluebirds were to Cinderella, my peaceful accomplices, I do not now think there is a tug of war between hive and elsewhere but a tension indeed exists, and this tension is new to me, it is the wonderful.

That with which I gain a beeline to courage.

I dismantled the bee kingdom and piece by piece in my workshop I rebuilt it without disturbing the ancient combs of its fascia, I dismantled my old slide and arranged the cypress into new bones, enough for three structures, winter is ending, the days are getting longer, the lake is pooling between the trees.

Also in cypress thin but strong a suitcase. Exhausted every winter night I had much to read and I did so aloud to my astonished sheep, and then I managed to spin and knit a grey lining, I explained to each sheep as I knit that they were moving to Maynard’s, I told them each in turn, over and over as I knit compartments for proper packing, socks in this cone, underwear in that, trauma here here here, my mother’s this here, my father’s that there. An empty one for the bathing suit I will buy.

One of the tins was not photographs but sewing notions, another full of what I at first thought were crammed paper roses but were rolled bills, all hundreds, like honeycomb ransom.

I catch the bus at Maynard's corner, we skirt Lake Superior, I wish the sheep well, I hope for the hive, whatever will be will be.